Instagram brought me exactly one real commission in three years
My daughter set up an Instagram for me about three years back. Told me I had to, everyone's doing it. I've put up maybe a hundred pieces since. Photos are average, I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
Total real paying commissions from it: one. A guy in Ohio who saw a welded piece and wanted something smaller in the same style. Paid in two installments, cash, no gallery cut. I've still got the message saved.
Everything else came from word of mouth, a local show, and a collector who's known my name for fifteen years. I keep posting because she keeps telling me to and it doesn't hurt. But if the account died tomorrow I'd lose one client and about three hours a week.
Not saying nobody sells that way. Just saying the numbers don't lie, and mine are what they are.
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I feel this. I sell a decent amount at markets and a few online, and every time I think "okay this time the algorithm will do something" it just... doesn't. My Instagram is basically a pile of evidence that I'm making things, and the actual buyers come from the guy who knows a guy, or someone who saw my stuff at a craft fair in 2022 and remembered me.
But that one commission though. One real person who found the work, wanted more of it, paid in cash. That's not nothing. Most people scrolling will never buy anything from anyone, so one out of a hundred pieces actually being seen by the right person is kind of how it works. It's a lottery ticket, not a strategy.
Your daughter's not wrong that you should be on there, but she might be wrong that it does anything useful. It's a business card that takes forever to update.
The "pile of evidence" thing really lands. I post partly because I want the record of work somewhere, but I stopped checking the numbers months ago and it honestly made posting easier. Less hoping, more just... filing.
And you're right about the one commission. Someone who could've scrolled past a hundred artists and instead reached out and paid in cash, that's a real thread to pull on. I have one like that too, from two years ago, and I still remember exactly what they said in the message. It's not nothing. It's maybe the only thing that isn't nothing. 🙂
"Pile of evidence" is a good way to put it. That's what it is. A record of work, not a sales floor. Once I stopped expecting it to sell anything, posting got easier. Now it's just filing.
And yeah. The one real one stays with you. Two years on and I could quote the message back word for word. Cash, no gallery, no fuss. It's thin evidence but it's the only kind that means anything.
That's exactly it. A pile of evidence. I keep telling myself it's a record of the work, which it is, but it's not a sales floor and I stopped pretending it was.
And yeah, the one commission counts. It's not a career, but it's real. Somebody looked at something I made and wanted their own. That's the whole reason any of us do this. The craft fair in 2022 thing, I know that pattern. People remember the work, not the post. They always have.